So can you search for a copy of the Balen Report that they spent £350,000 on and won’t let anyone have sight of. They also went to the Law Lards to stop it being released to a man called Sugar who took them to court. This case is now precedent and quoted every time they refuse information under the FOIA.

“But in addition, as a Christian organisation, Tearfund has in its operating principles that Christians should be involved with the whole of God’s creation, not just people.

“We have a good biblical mandate to be involved in climate change.”

The idea that Christians have a duty to campaign on climate change is already well established in the US, where organisations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) lobby on Capitol Hill and in their networks of churches across the country. –

Only three people are scientists? Four “low level” representatives? Seriously, are you people even reading this crap, let alone agreeing with it? What makes someone a “scientist” and who gets to decide if they’re “alarmists” or not? There were 28 other BBC representatives at the seminar, why focus on these four in particular? All the cheers of “Great journalism, good job, insightful work” seem to be clouding rational thought.

This should be about whether or not it’s right that the BBC can block FOIA requests, not another bullshit, entrenched debate on whether climate change is man made or not, and it certainly shouldn’t be dominated by five blatantly biased bullet points from “Bruce Hoult” when the very debate itself is about bias! Oh the irony…

“Anuradha Vittachi fled into exile from her native Sri Lanka at the age of 13, after her journalist family was subjected to life-threatening political persecution. This attempt to silence truth-telling journalists set her lifelong conviction in the importance of responsible media and good governance.”

So on the face of it, hardly the sort of person you would expect to be advocating the silencing of dissenting voices. But wait, also from the bio,

“Executive Director of OneWorld UK, and instigator of the OneClimate Initiative, which uniquely integrates Second Life islands with OneClimate.net (a Climate Facebook) and daily Climate News services, as a contribution to the birth of a low-carbon world – a fair and sustainable home for the worlds children.”

“contribution to the birth of a low-carbon world”, Ah! I see, silencing of dissenting voices, it’s OK if it is to defend one of your own pet ideologies. Got It.

I have periodically seen comments to the effect that the BBC employee’s pension trust is heavily invested in so-called green enterprises. I haven’t gone digging because I would first have to learn my way through the UK morass that is the equivalent of the U.S. SEC where I do spend some effort from time to time. I keep hoping that someone in the UK will follow the scent if there is one.

You asked on WUWT why the US Embassy would have been invited to the seminar. I have no direct knowledge but suggest that since the BBC sell a considerable amount of their output in the US, Trevor Evans would have been invited for two very good reasons:

1. to indicate to the US at the political level that the BBC were ‘on the same side’ and therefore the heavy BBC penetration of NPR was not to be feared

2. to demonstrate that the ‘climate message’ was going to be threaded into all BBC output including religion and comedy and that all the major environmental organizations were onboard

It is vitally important that any and all statements made by the BBC or its lawyers be collected up and posted. Next have a look at the code of ethics for the BBC.

The lawyers ( I assume its like the US) are officers of the court. If there are any misrepresentations or falsehoods, then you need to go after the lawyers. file complaints if that is allowed. Same for any BBC staff that had anything to do with putting together any statements about the issue.

I think that the reason is not so much to do with climate change – more that the BBC lied about the whole process. There are lies within lies in this story.

As far as I know, the seminar we are talking about was not originally intended to be a ‘policy-making’ meeting.

What I think happened is that the BBC unilaterally dropped their Charter requirement to provide balance in reporting Global Warming, purely due to internal activists. This change was noticed by outside bloggers, who started asking questions about why the BBC was in breach of its Charter.

So, to shut them up, the BBC responded that they had duly considered the issue, and received proper scientific advice that there was no real controversy. They picked a recent internal seminar (which had been held to promulgate the Global Warming message to internal BBC staff – nothing to do with policy) and claimed that this comprised ‘the top scientific brains’ who had provided this policy advice. There had been NO minutes – odd, for such a fundamental policy decision, but perfectly normal for a series of ‘awareness’ presentations..

That was meant to shut up the bloggers, who were crying for more details. The meeting was retrospectively claimed to be under the non-attributable Chatham House Rules, which neatly made it unable to be investigated.

Blogger Tony Newbery submitted a FOI request for the names of these august scientists who had advised the BBC to drop its impartiality position. The BBC fought this tooth and nail, finally spending a 6-figure sum on barristers and packing the Tribunal where, last Friday, the request was rejected on the spurious grounds that the BBC could consider itself to be a private organisation if it wanted to keep secrets from the public.

Now we can see that the meeting which was claimed to be with a policy-defining group of top scientists was, in fact, an activist jolly/propaganda exercise. And trying to hide this has cost the BBC a lot of money and face.

One of the IBT members is Islamic Relief, a charity organisation. But hold on.

UBS closes Islamic Relief account over terror risk
November 9, 2012
The U.K. based Muslim charity Islamic Relief has had its account closed and zakat donations to its account blocked by Swiss bank UBS due to counter-terror concerns. Islamic Relief is the world’s largest Islamic non-governmental organization, and Israel has previously accused it of funding Hamas.

BP’s stake in the cAGW panic:
In secondary recovery efforts, wherein depleted oil fields are flushed to recover residual oil, CO2 works best of all techniques. There are billions of barrels of North Sea oil that are left behind as reservoirs deplete through the course of normal production, and CO2 is the most efficient means of producing this residual oil, if injected into the reservoir in the secondary recovery effort. But CO2 is not readily available. Thus BP’s interest in suppressing skeptic viewpoints and fostering the cAGW panic, and thus they position themselves to ride the wave while reaping BILLIONS in profits from their ever so clean and green “Carbon Storage and Capture Technology” which they like to tout. They hope that the panic will provide the opportunity to hook the needed CO2. So why did BBC invite British Petroleum’s Ian Wright, CO2 Project Manager, to the BBC conclave which confirmed the policy of suppressing the skeptical viewpoint? It does not take a genius to see what is going on. Money greases the skids everywhere. Don’t expect the present Government to make a big squawk about BP. Of course, BP is not the only business that plays the panic-mongering for profit. Greased palms are a big part of the concert of cAGW panic mongering.

And remember that David Eyton of BP was a member of the Russell investigation (or white-wash) into Climategate at UEA! Lord Browne ex head of BP, was also know as “the Sun King” – he supported the “precautionary principle” on CO2 and used that position to help green BP’s image. Opportunists one and all ………………….

Andrew Montford was onto this way ahead of anyone, including Tony Newbery. But he can’t do everything (nor can Watts or McIntyre) so Newbery, then Morabito, took up the slack. It’s amazing to behold. Even if the MSM ignores this for a while the record is now there, for when the time comes.

Maurizio Morabito, thanks for your help on our webiste (Scef). I should have said what great work this is, but I’ve had a few problems with our server (after we issued our press release to the UK media).

Maurizio I have just recreated the method you outlined for unearthing this data. It has only increased my admiration for what you’ve achieved. In journalistic terms it must surely be equal to the cracking the Enigma Code! What a fantastic “amateur” effort that should have the professionals hanging their heads in shame.
Another victory for the little guy.

To find it yourself, you have to View Source (in Firefox on the Mac, under Tools > Web Developer). Then find the comment you want (I just searched for hoult) and add the comment id to the URL after the #, as I’ve done above.

There should be a permalink option with each comment but there ain’t so one has to do it the long way.

That’s a good brief summary. There are many other points, for example it seems from the IBT document that the meetings were not held under Chatham house rules (there is a direct quote from one participant in 2007), and that this was a fabrication invented as an excuse for not releasing the list. Hopefully Andrew M will write up the whole story in his usual thorough style, in the light of this new information.

“I wish I knew how to link to”

Here’s how to link to a particular BH comment. Go into ‘view page source’ and find the comment number (19235489). Then link as you have done in the post here, but with #comments replaced by #comment19235489 –

I believe that it is also important for two other reasons, as I mentioned on WUWT:

– it will help persuade the average viewer that the BBC is not to be trusted. At the moment the main reason the man-in-the-street ‘believes’ is that he has been told to by an authoritative source. In this case the timing is actually good – people are much more open to believing bad things about the Beeb at the moment.

– probably more importantly, it will have a chilling effect on the pro-global-warming party’s planning. They will now be much more secretive, always looking over their shoulder, much more prone to making mistakes. They are already moving into illegal territory with Heartgate – as they keep on being exposed they will find it harder and harder to expand and keep taking over establishment bodies in the way that they have done up to now. Sunlight turns out to be a good disinfectant, and cockroaches don’t like it….

Entwistle was ‘Head of TV Current Affairs’,
Boaden ‘Director of News’,
Rippon ‘Editor World at One,/PM’ – the main radio news and current affairs programme’ and Horrocks ‘Head of Television News’.

Also in attendance was Jana Bennet ‘Director of Television’.

How on earth any organisation can properly function with such a mish mash of a management structure is completely beyond me, but within those limitations, these guys were heavy hitters running the the most influential broadcasting outlets on Climate Change. Between them they covered all of the BBC’s news and current affairs. And they all spent a whole day being propagandised to by the activist wing of the alarmist movement.

So the BBC’s decision to break it’s charter commitment on impartiality and only present one side of the anthropogenic global warming argument resulted from a seminar whose 28 invited ‘experts’ were predominately eco-activists!

Senior management, including those now discredited by Newsnightgate, subsequently made misleading public statements about the composition of that seminar, tried to suppress already-in-the-public domain information which contradicted their public statements and were even economical with the truth on oath at public hearings.

Old Bill had it right all those years ago, Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark

Private Eye has a “Curse of Gnome” running gag whereby they highlight problems befalling their enemies. Given the 4 people you name above as in difficulty, I wonder if this meeting will have the same effect – the “Curse of BBC CMEP” ? Don’t know many of the “scientists” (who does?) but I wonder what has happened to them in the last 6 years ?

Private Eye did not mention climategate! It was the biggest scandal in scientific history … but private eye decided to squash the story. With even the Institute of Physics criticising the UEA, there was plenty of scandal.

So, don’t expect private eye to cover this story either. They are about as biased as you can get on this issue.

As I understand it, Ian Hislop is a big buddy of George Monbiot, so gets all his Cagw info from him. Monbiot is of course also in the news this week for his role in the other BBC story, regarding allegations of paedophilia. Safe to say that Hislop won’t make any comment about that on HIGNFY either.